This Business Week article talks about Rhapsody’s on-going efforts to expand and be a worthy rival to Spotify. They championed subscription-based music access long before any of the other remaining competitors in this market, so will always have some goodwill from me for that.

The Napster acquisition has put them “well over 1 million” subscribers, and now they’re looking to expand overseas as well.  Click the title link to read more.

I’ve always thought Echo Nest-powered playlist generation was the best around.  It was used in the late lamented Thumbplay, and Mog uses it to power their excellent “radio” feature.  

Spotify has smartly chosen to use it for the latest revamp of their own “Radio” feature, and I think it’s a great move. (And bad news for Mog, although Mog’s implementation still seems a bit more flexible.)

Interesting comparison of (US) music library selection based on the favorites of the rateyourmusic.com community. Surprisingly rdio seems to come out ahead. Click the title for details.

Yet another streaming music service vying for your money.  Follow the title link for more details.  This one seems to be emphasizing “simplicity”, which always makes me a bit nervous.  (It usually translates to “fewer features to confuse you”, which means a less capable service.)

On the other hand, it has a 3-month trial for .99 cents a month, so may be worth a shot.

UPDATE: When I went to check the rara.com site it said “coming soon”.  I’m not sure if that means it will launch later today, or if the US is not one of those countries it’s launching in.  I’ll update again once I figure that out. 

UPDATE 2: The site is up and available now. And, the .99 per month is streaming only, the special deal is $1.99 per month for the first 3 months if you want mobile access.  Worth checking out at least: http://www.rara.com

Interesting little piece. Title says it all.

This PC magazine article mentions that Spotify is going to have a news conference to announce a “New Direction” next Wednesday. They’re speculating it’ll just be them starting to actually sell music in the US, but I’d love to see them starting to include more built-in playlist generation features that work on both web and mobile clients.  We’ll see in a little over a week!

This Techcrunch article talks about the release of Spotify onto the latest version of Windows Phone.  All of those users enjoying their ‘metro’ UI can now also enjoy a serious challenger to the Zune Pass service for their source of subscription music.

There’s been a shortage of interesting articles on subscription services recently.  Everyone’s chatted about Spotify to death, and we’re now seeing the number of articles return to normal levels.

This article from the “paidContent” web site (a name that makes everything sound a bit shady, doesn’t it?) talks about rdio and spotify expanding into less-well-serviced countries, so people in these areas can look forward to greater options when it comes to music subscription services.

Click the title link to see the original story.

Fans of electronica who also use Spotify or rdio will have an expanded selection of music because of this. Good news!

Digster is a playlist/music discovery service from Universal that up until now was only available for Spotify users, but now has expanded to rdio as well.  A comment by a Universal executive near the end of the article implies it could very well be coming to Mog soon too.  Follow the title link to a CNET article with further details.